


Dial-Tone Echoes

by habicot



Category: Little Witch Academia
Genre: Angst, Depression, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, Phone Calls & Telephones, Sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-29
Updated: 2019-01-29
Packaged: 2019-10-18 18:13:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17585837
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/habicot/pseuds/habicot
Summary: Akko wakes up from another nightmare, and she needs to hear Diana's voice.





	Dial-Tone Echoes

**Author's Note:**

> Hi there! This is my first fic, so please leave a comment or critique on what you think of it! I never imagined that I would be doing something with character death involved (I love diakko desperately!) but I hope you enjoy watching the gaybies suffer a little bit. Thanks! :)

It was dark. Impossibly so, as if the last light in the world had been snuffed out, leaving the earth under an impermeable and impenetrable blanket of night. Akko held her hands in front of her face, and she didn’t have to see them to know that they were shaking. A cold sheen of sweat covered her feverish skin, and she wheezed a shuddering exhale, trying desperately to ease the painful knot of anxiety that twisted in her throat. 

‘Breathe, Akko,’ she scolded herself. This was so stupid. Hot tears pricked behind her eyes as the memory of the nightmare echoed through her mind mercilessly, a sick horror movie stuck on repeat, and she was the unfortunate viewer that couldn’t seem to look away. A pitiful whimper slipped past her lips and she squeezed her eyes shut tightly, balling her hands into tight fists and feeling her nails bite painfully into the soft skin of her palms. She felt weak; she was physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted to the point where even her own body seemed to betray her, the tears streaming down her sweaty cheeks unbidden and serving as a sore reminder of her helplessness. She wanted to curl in on herself and disappear and leave no trace behind, and she wanted her friends and family to let her. She breathed in again, but it did nothing to quell the roiling anxiety in her gut. 

Akko turned her gaze, ruby red eyes dull and void of their usual fire, to her left, where empty, untouched sheets lay at the opposite side of her bed. The bed that used to be theirs. The sight sent a fresh pang of despair through her, and she craned her neck back as a sob clawed its way through her chest and died behind her clenched teeth, a wild animal caged only by her last shred of self-control. 

Memories, bathed in the distant warmth of summertime and the balmy bliss of new love, taunted her incessantly, flashes of chaste smiles and furtive glances and concealed blushes a sickening juxtaposition to her current loneliness. She could nearly feel the soft blonde hair tickling her nose on a lazy Sunday morning, nearly smell the soft scent of jasmine tea and lavender shampoo, nearly see the flash of adoring blue eyes set above supple rosebud lips that would quirk themselves into a shy smile that Akko wanted desperately to kiss. 

She couldn’t take it anymore. 

Her whole body quivering with fear and fatigue and grief, Akko whipped her damp sheets away from her body, swinging her legs over the side of her bed until she felt her feet plant themselves firmly onto the chilly hardwood floor of her bedroom. She reached towards her bedside table and fumbled for her phone, squinting her eyes and recoiling at the invasively bright lock screen that flooded her pitch-black world in harsh florescent light. She hurriedly typed in her password and dialed a number she had come to know reflexively – one that was burned into every daydream and every nightmare that had plagued her life over the last six weeks, and she for once, she felt like she could breathe. Just looking at the numbers and the suggested contact name that accompanied them sent a shiver of relief through her, and she almost started to cry again. There was something nostalgic about it, something that for a moment allowed her to believe that this was normal. That she could call Diana’s number and she would pick up and say that she loved her. 

Akko pressed the green call button numbly. A static-laced ring. A second. A third. Then Akko’s eyes widened as a soft voice spoke to her through time and space, an amiable yet ever-formal, “Hello, you have reached Diana Cavendish,” lifting her spirits sky high before sending them plummeting into the depths of depression again.  
It wasn’t really her. It was a series of clever wires and circuits and bits of machinery designed to echo her, relay something she might have said long ago, but it wasn’t real. 

“Please leave your name and your phone number, and I shall reply to your message as soon as possible. Thank you,” said the answering machine, and in a moment of weakness – because Akko was terribly weak – Akko let her believe that she might reply. 

So she left a message. 

It took her a moment to get the words out. Her throat was dry and rough from disuse, but she cleared it and tried again. 

“Diana,” she murmured, as though the girl was beside her again, all soft smiles and sing-song laughter and gentle touches, “I miss you so much.” 

Akko felt thick tears roll down her face again, and her chest seized painfully, but this time, she didn’t try to fight it. 

“I thought we would be together f-forever,” she choked. She sniveled in an undignified way that Diana would have chided her for, allowing salty tears to drip down onto her neck and t-shirt and knees, but she didn’t feel it. “I don’t kn-know how to be alone a-anymore. I wish it had b-been me.” 

At the admission, Akko chuckled mirthlessly. “But you’d hate me for s-saying that.” 

Akko said nothing again for a while, reading the contact name on her phone over and over and over again, drinking in the letters like alcohol, like a numbing agent, to forget the ache in her heart. There was so much else she wanted to say to her. So much she had wanted them to do together. So much she never got the chance to tell her, like how Diana’s smile drove her heart into a frenzy, how her words sounded like liquid honey, sweet and clear and beautiful as poetry, and how Akko could get lost in her eyes for hours, diving into those endless depths of vivid ocean blue and never wanting to come up for air. How her hair looked like waves of moonlight and was as soft as sunbeams. How the sounds she made when they made love reverberated through her heart and filled her with adoration and pride. Everything, from their first kiss to their last, their first greeting to their last goodbye, an odyssey of indescribable feeling and emotion, a lifetime of sensation that she was lucky enough to have spent with the girl who would forever remain her first love. Perhaps her last. Undoubtedly her truest. 

But this message into a dead answering machine could only go on for so long. So Akko said, in a voice so quiet she wasn’t sure that she had spoken at all, 

“I love you. Goodbye,” and hit the end call button. 

She turned off her phone again, and once more, her world was plunged into darkness. She rolled over to the left side of the bed, the empty side, and buried her face into the pillow – one that smelled faintly of jasmine tea and lavender shampoo. She curled her body on the cold blankets. 

‘Breathe, Akko,’ she scolded herself, before slipping into a fitful, nightmare ridden sleep haunted by smiling blue eyes and hushed conversations and sweet, empty nothings – echoes of a love that had once filled her so entirely. Love that filled her completely, but that now rendered her nothing more than a shell, an unfortunate captive that couldn’t seem to free herself from the past, and Akko wondered idly if somewhere, wherever she was, Diana could hear her sobbing her name, breathing in her scent, and longing for her touch in the impermeable and impenetrable blanket of night that consumed her.


End file.
